Babies and Buns

My best friend of many years just had her second child.  Another bouncing baby boy has been added to our collective group of children, ages ranging all the way up to 20 years old.  I'm sure baby Jack will be the last child among us long time girl pals, and I'm just so thrilled he's arrived.

Going to visit her in the hospital brought me back to when Paul was born and my friends came to visit me. Being 24 and having my first child was a surreal experience.  Someone hands you a stranger in a small package and he's yours.  You've never done this before and everything is a first.  Now older, wiser, more confident in who I am, I look back and ask myself many different questions.  Why did I keep wearing the hospital gown the whole time I was there instead of putting on some damn pajamas?  Why did they keep putting two shirts on the baby, one the right way, and the other as pants? (which apparently they still do, by the way.)  So funny.  But when Ro and Jeanine came to visit me, Ro had a tray of coffees and a bag of pastries in her hand.  They were these crescent shaped, flakey type with powdered sugar sprinkled on top.  Oh my God, real food and real coffee.  Why had no one else thought of bringing me real food?!  I guess the grandparents were preoccupied.  The moment that child pops out, the mommy becomes just a person over there in the corner from which the best thing that ever happened to them sprung forth.

Those pastries and coffee stick in my mind today as a major part of my "first born" experience.  They weren't anything spectacular really, but they represented many things.  They told me that real life still existed outside that crazy, surreal bubble that had surrounded me for the last 24 hours.  They told me that my best friends thought that I was still just as important to them as the bundle of joy that I now possessed.  They also reminded me how well my friends knew me.

So when I showed up at the hospital Sunday, I brought a rice ball from Mama Theresa's with sauce on the side.  By the time you're 38, you know well enough that you bring your own pajamas and your family will bring you real food from home.  But still, I know Rosana loves rice balls and I thought she might need one.